It’s 1980 All Over Again

The new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows why Sen. John McCain still has a chance in a year when everything is going Barack Obama’s way.

Plug today’s generic political factors into any of the many forecasting models pitting Candidate A against Candidate B, and the Democrat wins in a landslide. The end of a two-term presidency with the incumbent’s approval at Watergate levels; widespread economic anxiety among the middle class, not just in general but in two panic-button areas (a real estate plunge and rising pricers for gas and food); and an unpopular war. It feels like 1979 and Jimmy Carter.

Add to that the fact that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki sawed off the remaining leg of McCain’s campaign stool by advocating a timetable on a troop withdrawal, the media’s obvious love affair with Obama, the McCain campaign’s blunders, the GOP’s utter ideological disarray, exhaustion and discontent; McCain’s age, missteps and inconsistencies that make him look like a Bob Dole redux, and Obama wins in a landslide.

So that leaves the big mystery of why McCain remains so close in the polls. One explanation: mid-summer presidential polls are the equivalent of bird entrails, as one political analyst put it. They are utterly worthless because no one really pays attention to the election until after Labor Day, and Obama will in a landslide as the models all predict and as the Democrats’ trajectory of big gains in the House and Senate indicate.

Or there’s what just about everyone in every dinner table conversation is so quick to say in private and we might as well say in public: Obama will lose because white people won’t vote for him.

The Wall Street Journal survey picks up some of this sentiment, and race for sure is a big wildcard. But it cuts both ways; some of Obama’s support among young and educated whites is in part because of his race. We just don’t know how it’s going to play in the general, but if the country wakes up Nov. 5 and McCain is president-elect, rest assured that everyone will blame white racism.

Yet the Wall Street Journal poll also points to another big factor: widespread lack of comfort and uncertainty about Obama’s experience and background. Although there is some overlap with race here, as the Journal pollsters point out, the clearest parallel is voter discomfort with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan was seen as an untested former actor who lacked foreign policy experience. It wasn’t until he nailed Carter in a debate that the ground shifted.

Reagan was running behind Carter through the summer. His prospects looked so uncertain that he came within inches of committing the fatal mistake of picking former president Gerald Ford as a running mate in what many believe would have been a disastrous attempt to reassure voters, killing Reagan’s own change mantra and undermining the entire raison detre of his candidacy, not to mention his presidency had he won.

(Obama clue phone: don’t pick Hillary as veep.)

Reagan of course won in a landslide, and all the political models show Obama doing the same. That leaves Obama with one simple and monumental challenge: overcome voter doubts about his capability and reassure wavering whites about his background, and the presidency is his.